Tom Kinnaird

Tom Kinnaird is founder of Kinnaird Negotiation, a global consultancy.  Tom is a seasoned negotiation trainer and coach with twenty-five years’ experience as a procurement leader and professional commercial negotiator. For fifteen years, he was Chief Procurement Officer at WPP, the world’s largest communications services group, where he led the global procurement team and ensured that WPP received value for money from its spend with external suppliers around the world.

Within WPP, Tom co-founded the Accord initiative, designed to uplift the negotiation, commercial and pricing skills of leadership teams and individuals across WPP’s highly complex world of multiple marketing communications agencies. He has more than a decade of experience teaching negotiation, and coaching leaders and teams through difficult and complex negotiation challenges. His particular areas of interest include:

• Helping leaders to better understand client procurement;

• Promoting game-changing moves in negotiation;

• Negotiation dynamics in competitive pitching;

• Conflict resolution (internal and external);

• Exploring innovative ways of teaching negotiation, including on-line training;

• Embedding negotiation learning and behaviors into organizations.

Throughout his career, Tom has also collaborated extensively with leading academic experts and training partners in the field of negotiation. With Hal Movius, for example, he has contributed to Harvard Business Review.

Prior to joining WPP, Tom was on the Board of a specialist procurement consulting business, advising international blue chip clients on design and implementation of procurement change programs. His early career was with SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals (later, GlaxoSmithKline), working in development chemistry, manufacturing and procurement/supply chain.

Based in London, he has an MBA, and a BSc (Chemistry).

“We need to understand negotiation in a wide range of contexts. Tom’s coaching approach was thoughtful and thought provoking, and often the insights were quite unexpected. He certainly helped me think about and tackle these issues more effectively.”

Mat Hughes, Managing Director, AlixPartners